The Recluse Who Hunts Assassins (the Insect Variety)

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The Recluse Who Hunts Assassins (the Insect Variety)

To catch kissing bugs, Brown strings up a white sheet and illuminates it with an incandescent light bulb. He often finds kissing bugs crawling on the floor near it, drawn to the light.

Brown holds a kissing bug in his bare hands. Scientist caution people who collect kissing bugs never to touch them with their bare hands.

Brown keeps bug he catches in expired pill bottles in his freezer.

Brown notes the location, time and date where each bug was found and slips it in the a pill bottle with the bug.

Brown spends much of his time wandering his property.

Brown climbs an eight-story tower he built besides his house for ham radio.

Brown finds a kissing bug on the radio tower.

Brown holds a "kissing bug" that he pulled out of a pill bottle in his freezer. Scientist caution people who collect kissing bugs never to touch them with their bare hands.

Brown surveys his land. He lives on 153 acres in Lexington, Texas.

Brown chooses to live a quiet, isolated life immersed in nature.

Texas A&M University houses the nation's largest repository of kissing bugs, little creatures that carry Chagas disease and tend to bite you on the mouth. Each of the 4,000 or so insects in the collection met its end at the hands of a "citizen scientist," one of 500 or so volunteers who scoop up scuttling insects and mail them to the university. Most of these folks are quite ordinary. But not Hugh Brown.

Brown lives in self-imposed exile in Lexington, Texas, about an hour east of Austin, on 153 acres of wooded land where the insects thrive. He's a genius—no, really, he's a member of Mensa—who cuts his own hair, spouts trivia about bats, and thinks nothing of stripping to his birthday suit and diving into a pond in front someone he just met.

The 69-year-old started collecting kissing bugs in 2013 after reading a pamphlet urging people to contribute to the university's research project. Why not, he figured. Contributing 100 hours to the project earns a nice break on your property taxes, and the bugs are bountiful. "I've gotten quite a few literally in my house," Brown says. "I've been lying in bed reading and found one of these guys crawling across my leg."

Ilana Panich-Linsman met Brown in July when Stat sent her to photograph him for a story about the citizen scientist program. She quickly found Brown more fascinating than the program and the creepy-crawlies he captures. “He’s like a modern-day John Muir or something,” she says. “He believes that cutting himself off from society helps induce new thought.”

Brown studied physics at Rice University but never pursued a career in science. Instead, he spent the early 1970s in a treehouse on a Honduran beach before moving to Lexington. Since then he's made his land a sanctuary for armadillos, skunks, bobcats, feral hogs and unwanted rodents the city of Austin brings by. Brown offers refuge to all wildlife. Except kissing bugs.

You can see why. Kissing bugs—also known as vampire bugs, assassin bugs, and other equally unpleasant names—carry the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi, a vector for Chagas disease. As if that's not gross enough, the parasites are carried in the insects' feces, which they tend to deposit after biting you, often near the mouth.

Brown possesses a talent for catching the bugs, which are most often found between May and October. He likes to hunt for them from a perch atop his ham radio tower, stuff them into medication bottles, and kill them in his freezer. They join their brethren at A&M's "kissing bug lab," where researchers dissect them and extract their DNA for analysis. “We now know that kissing bugs are found near people’s homes in the summer,” says researcher Rachel Curtis, “and that 60 percent of [kissing] bugs in Texas are infected with the parasite that causes Chagas disease.”

Brown takes a dip in a pond on his property.

Ilana Panich-Linsman

When Panich-Linsman arrived, she found Brown sitting on his porch, tying shoestrings around his socks to hold them up. He invited her in, pulled an enormous watermelon from the fridge, and cut her a slice. Brown explained his decision to let his land go wild, and to live an essentialist lifestyle. When he isn't catching kissing bugs or logging birds for the Audubon Society, Brown spends his days reading, writing and wandering his property. “I have a quiet, thoughtful life,” Brown says. “It’s wonderful.”

Once Stat reporter Eric Boodman arrived, Brown led them on a hike through sweltering heat to a small pond, where he stripped off his clothes and dove in. Panich-Linsman paused, not quite sure how to respond, before deciding that, yes, it was quite hot and she'd enjoy a swim, too. She stripped to her underwear and dove in. “You’re in his world,” she says. “I feel like photographers can work on long term projects for ages and never enter a self-contained world like that, where there’s no bigger context to put him in, nothing to juxtapose him against, because he’s in his world,” she says.

When the sun set, Brown set to work catching bugs. His visitors followed him up the tower to a small platform, 55 feet up and splattered with bird guano. Brown seemed immune to the stench as he strung up a white sheet and a bulb to attract his quarry. Within minutes, he'd caught his first kissing bug of the evening.

While some might consider Brown odd, Panich-Linsman found him inspiring. He seemed completely in touch with himself and with nature, focused only on the present moment and possessed of great insights. “At one point he turned to us and asked, ‘Have you ever had an original thought in your whole life?’” she says.

She found herself pondering that question hours later as she recounted what was by any measure a most unusual day spent with a most unusual man.